The Nation, March 22, 2021
Liberty’s Discontents
The contested history of freedom.
By Tyler Stovall
One of the more contentious issues to emerge during America’s Covid-19
crisis concerns the wearing of face masks. Heralded by public health
experts as a vital way to halt the spread of the disease, masks have
also been attacked by conservatives as unwarranted restrictions on
personal freedom. Donald Trump, who was briefly hospitalized with Covid
in the final months of his presidency, defiantly refused to wear a mask
in public, and he wasn’t alone: Thousands of similarly barefaced
supporters attended his rallies, public health consequences be damned.
Many Americans have challenged the call to wear masks, and the public
health research behind it, as an attack on their rights as citizens of a
free country. Last June, protesters stormed a hearing in Palm Beach,
Fla., at which public officials were considering whether to require the
wearing of masks in public buildings. During the fiery session, one
woman claimed, “You’re removing our freedoms and stomping on our
constitutional rights by these communist dictatorship orders or laws you
want to mandate.” As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted
after the meeting:
It was another great day for liberty—and yet a horrible one for tens of
thousands of Americans who now may die needlessly because so many cling
to a warped idea of freedom that apparently means not caring whether
others in your community get sick. The reality is that those
devil-worshipping elected officials and their mad scientists are trying
to mandate masks in public for the same reasons they don’t let
12-year-olds drive and they close bars at 2 a.m.: They actually want to
keep their constituents alive.
Give me liberty or give me death, indeed.
Ah, freedom! Few ideals in human history have been so cherished—or so
controversial. The United States, in particular, has built its identity
around the idea of freedom, from the Bill of Rights, enshrining various
freedoms in the law of the land, to the giant statue of Lady Liberty in
New York Harbor. And yet—interestingly, for such a foundational
ideal—freedom has throughout history represented both the means to an
end and the end itself. We wish to be free to pursue our most cherished
goals in life, to make money as we will, to share our lives with whom we
will, to live where we choose. Freedom empowers our individual desires,
but at the same time it structures how we live with other individuals in
large, complex societies. As the saying goes, my freedom to swing my
fist ends just where someone else’s nose begins; in the words of Isaiah
Berlin, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” The tension
between individual and collective notions of freedom highlights but by
no means exhausts the many different approaches to the idea, helping to
explain how it has motivated so many struggles throughout human history.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
FREEDOM: AN UNRULY HISTORY
By Annelien de Dijn
In her ambitious and impressive new book, Freedom: An Unruly History,
the political historian Annelien de Dijn approaches this massive subject
from the standpoint of two conflicting interpretations of freedom and
their interactions over 2,500 years of Western history. She starts her
study by noting that most people think of freedom as a matter of
individual liberties and, in particular, of protection from the
intrusions of big government and the state. This is the vision of
liberty outlined in the opening paragraph of this essay, one that drives
conservative ideologues throughout the West. De Dijn argues, however,
that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a
relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of
freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule
and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with
democracy. “For centuries Western thinkers and political actors
identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with
exercising control over the way one is governed,” she writes. Liberty in
its classic formulation was thus not individual but collective. Freedom
did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it
democratic.
By opening up freedom to its multiple meanings, de Dijn explores an
alternate history of the concept from the ancient world to the Age of
Revolution to the Cold War, charting those moments when new notions of
freedom—such as freedom from government supervision or
repression—deviated from its more classical and longstanding definition
as self-government. De Dijn thus shows how the rise of modernity brought
about the triumph of a new idea of liberty. At the same time, her book
invites us to consider the relationship between these two notions of
freedom. For de Dijn, this relationship functions as a fundamental
opposition, but one can also find in her history enough points in common
between them to realize that individual liberty also requires collective
freedom. For many, one cannot be truly free if one’s community or nation
isn’t; freedom must belong to one and to all.
De Dijn divides Freedom into three roughly equal parts. In the first,
she tracks the rise of the idea of freedom in the ancient world, with a
focus on the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic; in the second,
she examines the revival of this idea in the Renaissance and the Age of
Revolution; and in the third, she considers libertarian challenges to
the classical notion of freedom and the rise of a new conception focused
primarily on individual rights.
For most of this long history, de Dijn is quick to note, the classical
idea of freedom as democratic empowerment held sway. The turning point,
she contends, came with the reaction against the revolutionary movements
of the late 18th century in North America, France, and elsewhere.
Conservative intellectuals like Edmund Burke in Britain and liberals
like Benjamin Constant in France not only rejected the era’s
revolutionary ideology; they also developed a new conception of freedom
that viewed the state as its enemy rather than as a tool for its
triumph. Eventually, in the modern era, this counterrevolutionary
conception of freedom became dominant.
The heart of Freedom thus consists of an in-depth exploration of how the
demands of democracy gave birth to the original idea of freedom and how,
in the face of the democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, the
concept was once again remade. In tackling this rather unwieldy subject,
de Dijn uses the approach of intellectual history to tell her story,
centering her analysis around a series of foundational texts by famous
and obscure writers and thinkers alike, ranging from classical scholars
like Plato and Cicero through Petrarch and Niccolò Machiavelli to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Berlin. She
skillfully interweaves this textual analysis with the flow of historical
events, vividly illustrating the relationship between the theory and
practice of freedom and reminding us that no concept is immune to change
over time.
For de Dijn, the story of freedom begins with the Greek city-state,
which marked not only the birthplace of democracy but also the origin of
the democratic conception of liberty—the ideal of the self-ruling
city-state. She notes that a major part of the originality of Greek
thinkers was not just to contrast their freedom with slavery
(specifically the slavery of the Persian Empire) but also to
reconceptualize freedom as liberation from political rather than
personal bondage. By 500 bce, several Greek city-states, most notably
Athens, had begun to develop democratic systems of self-rule in which
all male citizens took part in decision-making through general
assemblies. De Dijn argues that ancient Greek ideas of freedom developed
in this context, emphasizing that freedom came with the ability of
people to rule themselves as free men. I use the words “free men”
deliberately because women and, of course, enslaved persons had no right
to participate in democratic self-government. That inconsistency in fact
reinforces de Dijn’s general point: that participation in democracy was
the essence of freedom in the ancient world.
In her discussion of freedom in classical Greece and Rome, de Dijn does
not fail to note the many objections to this idea of liberty, some from
leading philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. For example, in a passage
that, by raising the key issue of property rights, seems all too modern,
Aristotle noted, “If justice is what the numerical majority decide, they
will commit injustice by confiscating the property of the wealthy few.”
Gradually, many in Greece turned to another conception of freedom, one
that emphasized personal inner strength and self-control over democratic
rights. Yet the idea of democratic freedom did not die, even as these
notions of personal rights took shape—and this was especially true with
the formation of the Roman Republic.
Similar to the city-states of Greece, the Roman Republic thrived for a
while as the embodiment of freedom for its male citizens, grounding
liberty in the practice of civic democracy. Overthrown by Julius Caesar
and Mark Antony, the republic gave way to the Roman Empire, yet
historians and philosophers like Livy, Plutarch, and Lucan continued to
praise the virtues of the republican freedom fighters. In contrast, the
empire—and even more so its successor (at least in terms of the moral
imagination), Christianity—divorced freedom from democracy and instead
conceived it as personal autonomy and the choice to accept authority.
Out of the collapse of the classical city-states and republics came a
new ideal of liberty, one no longer centered on collective life and
political activity but instead on individual spirituality and a
submission to power.
The defeat of democratic freedom by imperial absolutism would play a key
role in shaping the revival of the ideal in the city-states of
Renaissance Italy, underscoring the link between artistic liberty and
self-government. The second part of Freedom considers this revival in
Europe from the Renaissance to the Age of Revolution. De Dijn notes, for
example, that Renaissance thinkers embraced the ancient ideal of
democratic liberty as a reaction against the aristocratic royalism of
the Middle Ages; the rebirth of knowledge was equally a rebirth of freedom.
Like the Renaissance in general, this renewed idea of democratic freedom
arose first in 14th-century Italy, where cities like Venice and
especially Florence bore a certain resemblance to the city-states of
ancient Greece. Humanists like Petrarch and Michelangelo embraced the
idea; even Machiavelli, best known to posterity for advising would-be
rulers in The Prince, argued in The Discourses for a return to the
ancient model of freedom. In Northern Europe, writers and thinkers
adopted the idea of democratic freedom in opposition to monarchical
rule, frequently characterizing the latter as freedom’s opposite,
slavery. This was especially true in England, where the Puritan
insurgents who executed King Charles I in 1649, at the height of the
English Revolution, referred to ancient models of liberty to justify
their unprecedented action.
In de Dijn’s analysis, the revival of democratic freedom laid the ground
for the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century, which she refers
to as the “crowning achievement” of the movement. Her analysis focuses
primarily on the American and French revolutions, especially the former.
Although she does mention the Haitian Revolution, it would be
interesting to see how a fuller consideration of that event, and of the
issue of slave revolt in general, might have shaped her analysis.
De Dijn’s consideration of the American and French revolutions continues
her emphasis on two themes: the indebtedness of theoreticians and
freedom fighters to the classical tradition, and the link between
freedom and democracy. John Adams, for example, compared the American
revolutionaries with the Greek armies that stood against Persia. A 1790
Paris revival of Voltaire’s play Brutus, about the most prominent of
Caesar’s assassins, won acclaim from the Jacobin public. De Dijn notes
how revolutionaries in both countries viewed submission to monarchy as
slavery and insisted not just on its abolition but also on the creation
of systems of government answerable to the people. She extensively
discusses the importance of ideas of natural rights during this era,
focusing on key documents like the US Bill of Rights and the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man, and she disputes the idea that these
constituted individualistic rejections of government interference,
arguing instead that they reflect the conviction that civil liberties
can exist only in a democratic polity.
Yet if the Atlantic Revolutions marked the apogee of the Renaissance’s
call for democratic freedom, they also constituted its grand finale, its
swan song. In the final section of Freedom, de Dijn explores the
historical reaction against democratic freedom that produced the
currently dominant idea of liberty as freedom from state interference.
This new interpretation arose out of the struggle against the American
and French revolutions; as she notes in her introduction, “Ideas about
freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”
This is the heart of de Dijn’s argument in this section of Freedom, and
she bases it on several themes. One is the idea, promoted by the German
philosopher Johann August Eberhard, that political and civil liberty
oppose rather than reinforce each other, that one could enjoy more
individual rights and freedoms in an enlightened monarchy than in a
democracy. The violence of the Reign of Terror during the French
Revolution gave this abstract argument concrete weight, enabling
democracy to be portrayed as the bloody rule of the mob and turning many
intellectuals against it. Burke was perhaps the best known of these
conservative critics, but he was certainly not the only one. Others
challenged the idea of majority rule, seeing in it not freedom but a
tyranny of the many over the few that was inimical to individual rights.
Constant rejected the revolutionaries’ attempts to return to the
democratic freedom of the ancient world, arguing instead that, in the
modern age, protecting individuals from government was the essence of
liberty.
This conflict over the legacy of the Atlantic Revolutions gave rise, de
Dijn argues, to modern liberalism, which during much of the 19th century
championed liberty and rejected mass democracy as the source of violent
revolution and tyranny. Throughout Europe, liberals supported
governments based on suffrage limited to men of property; as the French
minister François Guizot famously proclaimed, if people wanted the vote,
they should become rich. The upheavals of 1848 reaffirmed the dangers of
revolutionary democracy for liberal intellectuals. Ultimately,
liberalism merged with movements for popular representation to create
that strangest of political hybrids, liberal democracy. As suggested by
one of its foundational texts, Mill’s great 1859 essay “On Liberty,” a
system of limited democracy would allow the masses some stake in
government while at the same time protecting individual freedoms and
property rights.
The 19th century brought new challenges to the individualist idea of
freedom, however. In Europe, liberals viewed the rise of socialism as a
threat to personal freedom, above all because it threatened the right to
own property. In the United States, the Civil War challenged liberal
ideas of democracy and property rights by freeing and enfranchising
enslaved Black people. Indeed, we might say that the Civil War was
framed around contested notions of freedom: In the South, much more than
in the North, the war was initially portrayed as a struggle for
freedom—not just the freedom to own slaves but more generally the
ability of free men to determine their own fate. Likewise, in the North,
“free men, free labor, free soil” become a central mantra of the
Republican Party, and the war was also understood eventually as a
struggle for emancipation.
As de Dijn argues, these challenges would only continue and increase
during the early 20th century, leading to the decline of liberalism in
the face of new collectivist ideologies like communism and fascism. The
era of the two world wars seemed to many the death knell of individual
liberty, perhaps even of the individual himself. Even the attempts to
preserve freedom, such as the New Deal in the United States, seemed more
inspired by the traditions of democratic freedom than by its liberal
individualist renderings. It is therefore all the more remarkable that
the victory of these forces in World War II would bring about a powerful
revival of individualist liberalism.
In the decade after the collapse of Nazi Germany, intellectuals like
Berlin and Friedrich Hayek would reemphasize the importance of
individual freedom—what Berlin termed “negative liberty”—and their ideas
would land on fertile soil in Europe and America. Much of this
perspective arose out of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union
representing the same kind of threat to conservative ideas of liberty
that the Jacobin Republic had 150 years earlier. Cold War liberals
reemphasized the principle of liberal democracy as, in effect, limited
democracy with protections for individual rights against the passions of
the mob.
De Dijn largely concludes her analysis of freedom’s history with the
aftermath of World War II, but it is worth extending her story to
explore the success of this vision of liberty since the 1950s. In the
United States, in particular, the rise of the welfare state that began
with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society prompted a sharp
counterreaction, one that framed its politics around the idea of
individual liberty and resistance to big government. Traditional
conservatives in the Republican Party as well as a growing number of
neoconservatives linked their Cold War politics to their opposition to
the welfare state, insisting that the Soviet Union’s and the United
States’ experiments in social democracy had eroded freedom in both
countries, and they were joined by those resisting the achievements of
the civil rights movement, reinforcing the relationship between
whiteness and freedom. Triumphing with the election of Ronald Reagan as
president in 1980, this anti-egalitarian notion of freedom has dominated
the Republican Party and much of American political life ever since. The
House Freedom Caucus, to take one current example, owes its existence to
thinkers like Burke and Berlin.
Freedom is a challenging and compelling analysis of one of the greatest
intellectual and popular movements in the history of humankind. De Dijn
writes well, making a powerful argument that is both unusual and hard to
resist. She shows how the very nature of freedom can be interpreted in
different ways by different people at different times. More
specifically, she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in
the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very
different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective
self-government over individual privilege. In doing so, she shows how
philosophers, kings, and ordinary folk have used (and sometimes misused)
the past to build the present and imagine the future.
This is a very rich and complex tale, one that raises interesting
questions and suggests further exploration of some of its key themes.
Following the lead of one of the great scholars of freedom, Orlando
Patterson, de Dijn notes how many in the ancient world and at other
periods in history conceived freedom as the opposite of slavery and yet
also built ostensibly free societies that depended on the work of
slaves. The denial of voting rights and thus freedom to women during
most of history also speaks to this paradox. De Dijn underscores the
importance of this contradiction, but it would be useful to know more
about how people at the time addressed it. Slavery has existed
throughout much of human history, of course, but it is interesting to
note that the new antidemocratic vision of freedom emerged most
powerfully during a time characterized not only by the height of the
slave trade but also by the thorough racialization of slavery. Could it
be that it was easier to divorce freedom and democracy when slavery was
no longer an issue for white men and when the vision of rebelling
against slavery was upheld not only by ancient Greek fighters but also
by Black insurgents in the Haitian Revolution?
In her analysis, de Dijn stresses the triumph of the individualist
narrative of freedom in the years after World War II, but it bears
remembering that those years also witnessed the unprecedented success of
social democratic states, which offered an alternate vision of freedom
centered on social rights, redistribution, and working-class power. The
success of these states came directly out of the wartime experience;
millions who took part in the struggle against fascism fought not just
against the Axis but for a more just and democratic world.
Moreover, the postwar era witnessed two of the greatest freedom
campaigns in history: the struggles for the decolonization of European
empires and the American civil rights movement. Both overwhelmingly cast
themselves as crusades for a democratic vision of freedom. Julius K.
Nyerere, the founding father of an independent Tanzania, wrote no fewer
than six books with the word “freedom” in the title. The Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the greatest oration
in 20th-century America, ended with the ringing words “Free at last!
Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” One should note
that resistance to racial equality played a central role in the
formation of contemporary conservative ideology, so that to an important
extent, the movement for individual freedom was a movement for white
freedom.
Finally, one should consider the possibility that, at times, de Dijn’s
two ideas of freedom may have points in common. In 2009, at the dawn of
the Tea Party movement, a right-wing protester reportedly shouted, “Keep
your government hands off my Medicare!” This statement, grounded in
ignorance of the fact that Medicare is a government program, prompted
much derision. But we should take a second look at what this suggests
about the relationship between these two contrasting ideas of freedom.
The civil rights movement, to take one example, was a struggle for
individual rights not based on skin color and, at the same time, for the
protection of those rights by a more democratic government. To take
another example, in June 2015, the movement for LGBTQ rights achieved
one of its greatest victories in the United States with the Supreme
Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. But did this represent the
triumph of a democratic movement for freedom or the destruction of
government restrictions on the rights of individuals to marry? In other
words, isn’t protecting individual freedom precisely a key point of
modern democracy?
It is to de Dijn’s credit that Freedom: An Unruly History forces us to
think about such important questions. At a time when the very survival
of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more
important than ever, as our societies contemplate both the heritage of
the past and the prospects for the future.
Tyler StovallTyler Stovall is a professor of history and the dean of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University. His latest
book, White Freedom, was published this year.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7441): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7441
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81522854/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
